MAGA movement

For many decades we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry, subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military. We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own and spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world. But that is the past and now we are looking only to the future.

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first.

— Donald Trump, Inauguration speech, January 2017

"Make America Great Again" (MAGA) is a United States political slogan most notably used by Donald Trump in his successful 2016 presidential campaign. Originally used by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 run, the phrase became closely associated with Trump's message and served as one of his core slogans. Since his rise in popularity, the phrase has been used both by Trump's supporters and detractors as a shorthand for his electoral base, aligned politicians on a federal and state level, and overall political ideology as a subset of the broader Republican Party. This heterogeneous movement combined the traditional Republican middle class suburban (typically boomer) base with white supremacists, neo-fascists, and reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie and petite-bourgeoisie especially to create a new movement which helped to elect Trump in 2016. This nascent, self-aware force is variously known by terms like Trumpism, MAGAism, or America First, but the term MAGA Republicans was solidified in part by a campaign speech made by President Joe Biden in 2022 condemning the faction and clearly distinguishing it from respectable, "mainstream" Republicans.

Leftist analysis of, and response to, the surging MAGA movement has been splintered and disorganized, especially due to the weak position of the US left. Some organizations, such as the CPUSA, refer to MAGA as "fascistic" or "neo-fascist" and, inspired by the traditional "United Front" theory, support voting for Biden or another candidate to prevent a second Trump term. Other leftists argue that the elements of fascism are not salient enough to justify voting for Biden, whose presidency has been universally criticized by leftists, or consider Trumpism to be subordinate to the Republicans and so disorganized that it failed to accomplish any clear goal during the January 6 riot.^{[instances needed]} This situation has even resulted in deviations such as MAGA Communism, which combines Trump's nationalistic rhetoric with social democratic politics and opposition to "woke" liberal Democrats and leftism in general.

Campaign slogan

In December 2011, following speculation that he would challenge sitting president Barack Obama in the 2012 United States presidential election, Trump released a statement in which he said he was unwilling to rule out running as a presidential candidate in the future, explaining "I must leave all of my options open because, above all else, we must make America great again." The same month, he published Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again which was later reissued with the subtitle "Make America Great Again!" during his 2015 presidential campaign. In 2012, a group of his supporters submitted paperwork which would have allowed Trump to use the name for his own third party should he choose to form one; Trump himself began using the slogan formally the day after Obama was re-elected. He has since claimed that he had been unaware of Reagan's use of the phrase.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump's team developed and sold various types of merchandise labelled with the phrase, but red baseball caps with the words in white text became by far the most popular. The hats became a symbol of his base and were treated in some contexts as socially unacceptable, to the point that some people complained of being associated with the group for wearing ordinary red hats, difficult to distinguish at a distance. The slogan was so important to the campaign that at one point it spent more on making the hats – sold for $25 each on its website – than on polling, consultants, or television commercials. Millions were sold, and Trump estimated that counterfeit versions outnumbered the real hat ten to one but said, "every time somebody buys one, that's an advertisement."

In 2017, after only one year in office, Trump had already decided on the slogan "Keep America Great" for his re-election campaign, which he used in 2020 alongside the former slogan. Within a week after Trump left office following his farcical attempt to stay in power, he spoke to advisors about possibly establishing a third party, which he suggested might be named either the "Patriot Party" or "Make America Great Again Party". In his first few days out of office, he also supported Arizona state party chairwoman Kelli Ward, who likewise called for the creation of a "MAGA Party". In late January 2021, the former president viewed the proposed MAGA Party as leverage to prevent Republican senators from voting to convict him during the Senate impeachment trial, and to field challengers to Republicans who voted for his impeachment in the House.

Some commentators have called the phrase itself a racist dog whistle that implies a turn back to conditions before the overthrow of the Jim Crow system. Since 2016, the phrase "Make America White Again" was used by hate groups and politicians who align themselves with Trump. A 2018 study that used text mining and semantic network analytics of Twitter text and hashtags networks found that the "#MakeAmericaGreatAgain" and "#MAGA" hashtags were commonly used by white supremacist and white nationalist users, and had been used as "an organizing discursive space" for far-right extremists globally. The slogan has been imitated by far-right parties worldwide, including the Spanish Vox Party with "Make Spain Great Again", the United Australia Party with "Make Australia Great Again", and in Israel, "Make Israel Great Again" along with the acronym MIGA.

On June 3, 2023, Trump called his supporters Magadonians.

Ideology

The MAGA movement, as an anti-intellectual movement, deliberately avoids clear definition. Some core elements of MAGA rhetoric and policy proposals include the following:

• Nativism and xenophobia:

• Support for domestic industry through tariffs and trade agreements
• Fierce and violent opposition to non-White immigrants and immigration reform
• Skepticism toward certain elements of US imperialism such as the War on Terror and the Ukraine war

• Distrust of liberal institutions:

• Complete distrust of almost all mainstream media which doesn't align with far-right politics
• Deep suspicion of the electoral process and accusations of electoral fraud
• Accusations of hidden corruption and a pro-Democratic "deep state"
• Opposition to COVID-19 vaccination mandates or shutdowns
• Close association with QAnon and other conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic narratives

• Authoritarianism/reactionism:

• Corporatism and opposition to democracy
• Dehumanization and delegitimation of political opponents
• Theocratic and fundamentalist tendencies

The actual practice of the MAGA movement, however, could be called incoherent and is continuously changing. In office, Trump himself behaved in many ways like an ordinary Republican – cutting taxes, terrorizing immigrants, undermining social services, rolling back environmental regulations and climate change agreements, putting garden-variety establishment reactionaries in the Supreme Court, and supporting aggression and escalation against China. His anti-China tariff policies were only an escalation of Obama-era policies and as of 2024 have not been repealed by the Biden administration. His actual deviations from bipartisan orthodoxy include his absurd Mexico "border wall" proposal, which failed due to lack of support in Congress, and the 2017 Muslim ban, which Republicans harshly condemned when Trump initially proposed it during the race, falling in line only when he was in office. This influence on Republican politicians due to his singular popularity with the party's supporters is notable.

Analysis

Fascism

Adolph Reed, Jr.

As I’ve done in the past, I want to make clear that I do not argue that we must always vote for the Democrat on principle, no matter what. Indeed, Michelle Goldberg accused me a decade ago in these pages of “electoral nihilism” for having had the temerity to argue that the boundaries of a thinkable left cannot be limited by what’s acceptable within a neoliberal Democratic Party—and, God forbid, having voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.

I won’t rehearse my entire voting history in presidential elections here, but I do want to argue the following points as strongly as possible. First, that it’s necessary to approach the electoral domain instrumentally, not as a moment for moral declaration. Second, that despite Biden’s great limitations (and there’s no question they are great), this is truly an instance in which the pathetic mantra that the Democrats have offered us for three decades—“the other guys are worse”—is true. And they are nightmarishly worse. We could be facing the destruction of whatever democratic institutions exist in American society, along with labor rights, civil rights, environmental protections, popularly accountable government, social wage policies, and public goods and services across the board, not to mention the imposition of a brutishly draconian and punitive regime.

The noted Marxist scholar and activist Adolph Reed, Jr. considers the MAGA movement to be a fascistic entity and a real threat to liberal democracy and workers' rights. He did not endorse Biden in 2020 but has endorsed him in 2024. Reed has maintained, however, that a left working-class movement, the likes of which does not exist in the United States, must be built in order to defeat the right.

Base of support

Republican Party

Since his election in 2017 and even after leaving office, Trump has endorsed hundreds of Republican politicians who he considers to be aligned with his agenda. In addition, the House "Freedom Caucus" is considered to be aligned with Trump. By January of 2024, over 100 Republican Congress members had endorsed Trump's campaign.

Trump's supporters typically call their opponents within the Republican party "RINOs" ("Republicans In Name Only"), indicating that these opponents do not embody the true values of US reactionism and conservatism the party represents.

Opposition

Democratic Party

Biden's campaign speech on Sep 1, 2022, now well-known for its elaboration of Biden's analysis of the MAGA movement as "dedicated to destroying American democracy".

During remarks at the White House on May 4, 2022, President Joe Biden referred to former President Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement, saying, "This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history, in recent American history." In a well-publicized campaign speech on Sep 1, 2022, Biden said that "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic," and that "MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies." On September 1, 2022, he dedicated remarks at the White House "on the continued battle for the soul of the nation"